On Iraq, Contradictory Coverage

What's happening in Iraq? Today's New York Times offers conflicting stories. A page one article by Tim Arango reports:

residents of Mosul say that so far the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has handled the local population with a light touch. Some residents, hardened by their hatred of the army, spoke of the insurgents almost as if they were a liberating army. The militants, residents said, greet people at checkpoints and ask citizens if they are carrying a weapon, and if the answer is no, they let them on their way.

Many spoke of being able to move around the city more freely for the first time in years, after the militants unblocked roads that the army had shut down for security reasons and took down the blast walls that had become a permanent feature of nearly every major Iraqi city over the last decade.

Yet a dispatch inside the paper, also under Mr. Arango's byline, reports:

Some residents who remained in Mosul reported on Thursday that militants used mosque loudspeakers and leaflets to invite all soldiers, police officers and other government loyalists to go to the mosques and renounce their allegiance to the Baghdad authorities or face death. The occupiers also banned sales of alcohol and cigarettes and ordered women to stay home.

It's hard for me to understand how ordering women to stay home and threatening government loyalists with death amounts to a "light touch."

I understand it is a chaotic wartime situation and a developing news story and that Mr. Arango is probably operating on little sleep and at some considerable personal safety risk. But surely there's some editor in New York whose job it is to read all this coverage before it goes in the paper, to spot contradictions like this, and to ask Mr. Arango to explain or clarify them for the sake of readers who are trying to understand what is going on in Iraq and who look to the Times, with its staff of reporters there, to help them.